This means, among other things, that Sterling can’t attend games or take an active management role in the team that he still, for now, majority-owns. He’ll be encouraged, but apparently not forced (at least not yet), to sell the team. That last part could conceivably lead to a court case.

Other LA buyers would have to be turned down in favor of Steve Ballmer and Chris Hansen. (Former Malcolm in the Middle star Frankie Muniz has supposedly talked, or been talked about, about fronting a group to buy the team.)

The Clippers’ share of Staples Center would have to be sold back to the Lakers and the NHL’s LA Kings.

The league’s other team owners would have to be convinced that having two teams in the #2 TV market (even if that second team is the traditionally hapless Clippers) would be less lucrative than regaining a team in the #12 TV market.

But think of the possibilities: If the Clippers were co-owned by an ex-Microsoft CEO, they could bring back the old Windows Office Assistant mascot “Clippy”!

For the 28th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known solar systems. As always, this is a prediction of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, not necessarily what’s hot and not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some BlackBerry stock to sell you.

SST Records boss Greg Ginn, Black Flag’s original lead guitarist, claims to own the Black Flag name, and is suing his ex-bandmates who are touring as “Flag.” Ginn, as you may have heard, also has his own Black Flag “reunion” tour underway. Ginn’s also suing Black Flag’s most famous ex-member, Henry Rollins, even though Rollins isn’t in either “reunion” venture.

According to Richard Metzger, the greatest document of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles musical career is a concert doc filmed in Seattle—in the acoustically notorious Kingdome, even.

David Meinert’s growing restaurant empire will include the successor to Capitol Hill’s legendary dive bar the Canterbury.

Time to restart the neo-Sonics rumor mill again. Now, Chris Hansen and co. are reportedly negotiating for an expansion franchise.

The state’s thinking of authorizing private pot smoking clubs. I only ask that they be ventilated in such a way as to keep that weed stink off the streets.

The Republican-stalled Legislature still hasn’t saved King County Metro Transit. But, on the Seattle-only transit front, Mayor McGinn still plans to invest in a new downtown streetcar line. This probably means the mourned Waterfront Streetcar will remain dead for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, the second Monorail Initiative tell-all book is out. It’s called Rise Above It All.It’s written and self-published by Dick Falkenbury, the ultimate political outsider and co-instigator of the plan that would have had trains on grade-separated tracks, roughly where the RapidRide C/D bus goes now.

MTV’s playing music videos (remember them?) again. But just for half a day, on the Fourth of July.

A woman at the big video-game industry confab Tweeted® a complaint about the lack of female starring characters in new video games. Cue the bigoted trollbots in 5, 4, 3….

R.I.P. Arturo Vega, associate of the Ramones for their entire band-career and designer of the group’s “All American” logo (still worn on T shirts by people who weren’t alive when the band was together).

Steven Spielberg sez the reign of action mega-blockbusters (and of the big Hollywood studios!) is only a few box-office flops away from being over. Then he says audiences can expect really high prices for the privilege of seeing a movie in a theater (yes, even higher than they are now).

Robert Reich sez we could have full employment, even in an age of robotized manufacturing and other techno-”innovations,” if we only had the political will to make it so.

A UK pundit with the appropriate name of Tom Chatfield agrees with me that society, far from becoming “post literate,” is actually more dependent upon written language than ever. And he ponders whether it’s a good thing:

There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity.

Turns out the heroine from Brave isn’t the only female character in cartoons (and toys) to have been “tarted up” in recent years. Just look what they’ve done to Strawberry Shortcake!

Last Sunday’s Seattle Times depicted south King County as the region’s new nexus of “diversity.” Monday’s Times depicted the same spot as the region’s new nexus of poverty. (Note: This post originally, incorrectly, said both articles had run in Sunday’s paper.)

SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: The thin gruel of the ex-newspaper site just got thinner with the disappearance of Casey McNerthney, who just got poached by KIRO-TV.

Whatever happened to the great Seattle tradition of quasi-illegal “guerrilla art”? Terror paranoia, among other things.

Seattle’s next best hope for a neo-Sonics basketball team: the notion that the NBA might consider an expansion team, once commissioner and not-so-covert Seattle enemy David Stern is finally gone.

You know the mini-scandal that Disney marketeers were transforming the heroine from Brave into the sexy princess type that, in the film, she overtly refused to be? They’re backing off from that now.

In The Office (US version), Staples was often name-dropped as Dunder Mifflin Paper’s biggest Goliath-esque rival. Turns out that was paid product placement. And a Staples subsidiary is now selling official Dunder Mifflin branded office products.

If you’ve followed the Silvio Berlusconi sex and corruption scandals, you can expect there’s a lot of colorful Italian political slang.

Timothy Noah insists economic inequality is as much a matter of a “skills-based gap” (i.e., the “educated class” pulling away from the traditional working class) as it is a matter of 1-percenters’ greed.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson invites you to continue to “yawn” at the newest batch of trumped-up pseudo-scandals attacking Obama.

Seattle teachers who refused to administer standardized tests have achieved a partial victory.

Just last week, we bemoaned the idiotic prose and strained “corporate hip” attitude of KOMO’s “young skewing” local website Seattle Pulp. Now the whole site’s dead, without even leaving its old posts alive.

Katy Evans at the Tacoma group blog Post Defiance notes how indie live music has become a more complicated, bureaucratic, and problematic biz, especially in towns like hers in the shadow of bigger towns.

Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: The paper’s own reporters have to pay for website subscriptions to their own work. Except they can “opt out” of it if they insist.

You remember how the New Orleans Times-Picayune went to only three print issues a week? No more. They’re now putting out newsstand-only editions on the four non-home-delivery days, just like the Detroit papers are.

Talking into computers and expecting them to understand you has always been, and apparently will continue to be, little more than a screenwriters’ conceit.

Anthony Galluzzo at Salon wants you to stop the hipster-bashing already. He says it’s old, tired, and becoming classist.

Jim Tews, who describes himself as “a decent white male comic,” insists that most white guys performing standup are not sexist boors.

Bad news everyone: Futurama is canceled, again, perhaps this time forever (but that’s what they said the last time).

Speaking of shows (and characters) which have come back from the dead, the once-dead online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live have miraculously re-revived like Lazarus Dixie. Episodes stream on Hulu.com starting Monday.

The film itself has gone on to the big Netflix stream in the sky cloud, but the original website advertising Space Jam lives on!

One or more of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors had been taking female writers out of a page about “American novelists” and into a page about “American women novelists.” But people complained, and the sex-segregation has stopped. This isn’t much different from indie bookstores (like Seattle’s Left Bank Books) separating “women’s fiction” from “general fiction.”

King Street Station, one of Seattle’s two historic railway passenger terminals (and the one still in use by Amtrak) has looked so drab and awful for so long. In the pre-Amtrak desperate last years of private passenger rail, the Great Northern had “modernized” the main lobby with an acoustic-tile drop ceiling and other ill-informed touches. Now, after a half-decade of planning and reconstruction, the city and private partners have finally restored the room to its full grandeur. You can read all about it here. There’s a grand opening on Wed. 4/24, 11 a.m.

Are the Sonics Back Yet (Day 100)?: No. And we were supposed to have found out this weekend whether they’re coming back, at the NBA team owners’ annual hobnob session. But that vote’s been indefinitely delayed.

We do know that any neo-Sonics would have to negotiate cable-TV carriage of their games with the Mariners, who just bought a controlling interest in Root Sports Northwest.

The Oregon Ducks, aka “Nike U.,” have been slapped with NCAA penalties for football recruiting violations.

Some Net-pundits are crowing about the simple but apparently devastating “spreadsheet error” at the heart of a 2010 think-tank study promoting “austerity economics” to attack government debt. If not for the faulty math, the study’s critics claim, the study’s claims would be seen as the nonsense they are. Yeah, but facts have seldom gotten in the way of “shock doctrine” partisans, before or since.

Eco-Scare of the Week (non-fertilizer edition): Even before rising sea levels submerge many small Pacific islands, they’ll fatally disrupt those places’ fresh-water tables, making them uninhabitable.

Aaron Steven Miller at Medium.com wants book publishers to take the lead in tech-ifying and social-media-ifying their operations, before Amazon completely crushes them. Of course, that would require book publishers to cease being, as Miller puts it…

…historically the stingiest, most fiscally conservative, most technologically resistant and investment-averse people ever, with the highest percentage of luddites per capita.

Garance Franke-Ruta at the Atlantic wishes U.S. feminist demonstrators had more dignified, less confrontational visual icons under which they could march. Symbols like “Columbia,” the historic female representation of the nation/continent/hemisphere. Of course, there’s this little matter about how this icon is now best known as a movie-studio logo—now owned by Sony….

Do you wanna believe Knute Berger, who mourns the pending loss of certain local architectural landmarks to developers and their megabucks lawyers? Or David Moser at Citytank, who believes higher-density urban neighborhoods are the only way to keep lower-income folk from being shoved out to costly, car-dependent suburbs?

Military officials don’t like a proposal in the state legislature to let “payday loan” companies trot out even more predatory lending products (which are often, but not solely, aimed at troops and their families).

Cord Jefferson at Gawker believes when journalism is only open to people who don’t need a paycheck, only people who already have money will be journalists; and, possibly, only stories of interest to people who already have money will be reported.

First went Borders; then Swerve at First and Pine; then Easy Street Records on Mercer and Queen Anne Avenue. Now, the Silver Platters music superstore in the east lower Queen Anne district is going away. This leaves the shrunken CD selection at Barnes & Noble as the last music store in greater downtown. Silver Platters will move in June to 2930 1st Ave. S., across from Sears and near the future basketball arena.

It’s the end of another no-nonsense neighborhood eatery, Claire’s Pantry in Lake City.

There’s a newly revised waterfront park scheme. It’s better than the one originally devised by the hi-priced NYC architects. But to me it’s still too devoted to world-classness, not enough to being useful to people who live here.

Matt Hale, beaten a year ago by still-unidentified thugs after his shift as a Belltown condo doorman, is “still struggling.”

Lost among all the gripes about host Seth McFarlane’s rude unfunniness, there was another controversy at the Oscars (née the Academy Awards, a name totally unuttered at this last ceremony). Rhythm & Hues, which produced the computer animation seen in the multi-award-winning Life of Pi, is bankrupt and laid off over 200 staffers. It couldn’t compete against subsidized overseas studios. When Pi visual-effects director Bill Westenhofer gave his acceptance speech he tried to mention this, but his mic was promptly cut off when he did.

In less prestigious protest campaigns, some people are really upset that McDonald’s has phased out Chicken Selects, perhaps the only truly food-like thing on its regular menu.

James Howard Kuntsler says the “era of the giant chain stores” is over. He thinks it will lead to a resurgence of mom n’ pop retail. I see it as more like the ultimate triumph of Internet “e-tail.”

Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler’s mom was a ballet dancer—and a onetime girlfriend of the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas. Ziegler’s turning this story into a very-limited-edition art book.

In other news about local women and art and books and images of hotness, Charlotte Austin and Ciolo Thompson have created The Better Bombshell. In it, a variety of writers and artists of both genders contemplate that age-old issue of female role models and what they should be now.

Chuck Thompson at the New Republicderides microbrews, and the brewpubs who sell them, as icons of silly urban gentrificaiton. But they’re really, really tasty icons of silly urban gentrification.)

The sad tale of the “food critic on Food Stamps” finally has a happy ending. Ex-Tacoma News Tribune restaurant reviewer Ed Murrieta finally found a job, after spending years among the long-term unemployed. He now writes blurbs for Sacramento’s tourism board.

Seattle artist Shawn (“Beatkit”) Wolfe’s simple absurdist gag about tech product hype, the “RemoverInstaller,” is 20 years old and still going strong in a new “anniversary edition.”

Alden Mason, 1919-2013: The master Northwest landscape painter deftly switched to beautiful yet playful abstractions, then again to cartoony acrylic works that fit right in with the “pop surrealist” movement (yes, that term again). The point is, he kept looking for something new to do, and always did it well.

Even before it’s digested Seattle Weekly, the Canadian-owned Sound Publishing has bitten off its biggest local media morsel yet, acquiring the Everett Herald from the Washington Post Co. Not included in the sale are the Herald’s building or its printing plant. (Sound already has a plant in Everett that prints its assorted suburban and small-town weeklies.) The Seattle Times now runs the Herald’s home-delivery operation.

Surprising nobody, Chris Hansen’s group has officially applied to the NBA to move the Sacramento Kings (which Hansen’s group has already applied to buy) to Seattle.

Budapest’s current nightlife fad, that of “ruin pubs,” is threatened both by upscale development and by commercialized fake ruins.

The Society of Illustrators thought it got a good deal when it contracted the printing of its latest Annual of American Illustration to a Chinese printer. That was until the plant refused to print a page containing an unflattering caricature of Mao. The society got its book copies with a blank page where that piece was supposed to be. It was later printed separately and hand-inserted into each copy.

As we patiently await the NBA owners’ vote that will likely bring back the Sonics, there’s word of a hockey team that may be in need of a buyer and/or new home. Seattle, alas, doesn’t have an NHL-ready space. The hockey configuration of KeyArena is too small and awkward. Until a new arena’s built, the closest thing we’ve got is the Tacoma Dome, whose ice-making gear was removed and would need replacing.

City Councilmember Jean Godden vividly explains why we cannot, dare not, return to the bad old days before legal abortion.